The lowering of higher education

George Walden reviews University to Uni by Robert Stevens

12:01AM GMT 26 Jan 2004

As a Minister of Higher Education I was reviled by the Labour Opposition for promoting a modest version of student loans (for maintenance, not fees). I rather enjoyed the battle, which seemed to me in a good cause.

What is depressing, however, is the fact that 17 years later the debate over who pays for higher education still rages, while our universities face accelerating decline. Only now it is the Conservatives who vote, not just against what they know the universities need, but what they themselves believe. We would have brought in top-up fees like a shot, had we been able.

Robert Stevens's book is excellent because he understands the social dynamics behind the hara-kiri of our higher education. "The articulate middle classes", he writes, "regarded the universities as their personal part of the Welfare State." That is why successive oppositions, concerned with cheap political advantage, do their best to block sensible reform.

Stevens quotes a YouGov poll that helped persuade Iain Duncan-Smith to jettison principle and go for tactical voting on Labour's proposals for top-up fees. It suggested that a change of policy in this field promised more votes than on any other issue. So Duncan-Smith switched policy. Few subjects have suffered more from our politicians' tendency to put party before country than education.

Stevens's historical account brings out the phoniness of much of the debate, with its recurrent neurosis about elitism, resentment of Oxbridge and plain untruths about the real causes of the failure to attract a decent cohort of working-class students into top universities. Although Stevens is at first detached, you can almost hear him running out of patience as he reaches the modern era, where the book is spiced with sardonic footnotes and asides. He has a particular distaste for the middle-class habit of disguising its highly self-interested reluctance to contribute to university costs as a sudden bout of concern for the educational fate of the poor and humble.

The author is adept at underlining facts we may have overlooked or forgotten. Student numbers have grown from 510,000 in 1975 to 1,100,000 today, and universities now only receive roughly the same per student as comprehensive schools. Lady Thatcher admitted in her memoirs that her academic critics "had a stronger case than she would have liked", and regretted giving them openings to describe her policies as philistine. Shirley Williams, meanwhile, naturally opposes fees and prefers higher taxes. Stevens makes clear his view that, having fouled up secondary schools, the Baroness is intent on making a thorough job of it, by doing her bit for the decline of the universities.

The suspicion that what we are seeing is the comprehensivisation of higher education is strengthened by the guff that is now spouted about our universities as well as our schools. Stevens's favourite example is from the Dearing Report of 1997: "We recommend that, with immediate effect, all institutions of higher learning give high priority to developing and implanting learning and teaching strategies which focus on the promotion of students' learning." When an official report talks this way, the culture of excellence is gone. Whatever you think of the Robbins Report of 1962, cornerstone of the current system, it was written in English.

Robert Stevens has the perfect credentials for writing his book. A law professor with years of college administration under his belt, in America as well as Oxford, he brings outside experience to a stiflingly ingrown debate. The best thing about the book is its businesslike tone. There is not a whiff here of that supercilious aloofness from the financial facts of life and the imperatives of management that so frequently discredits the academic case for better treatment - with its implication that it is for them to think higher thoughts and for lowlier folk to find ways to grub up the money.

Simply by telling the story of how we got where we are Stevens makes an unanswerable case for top-up fees. It would be pleasant to think that MPs of all parties might read his book, but it seems unlikely that many will wish to be distracted from their parliamentary gymnastics by Stevens's wisdom, clear-thinking and mastery of historical fact.

George Walden was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State DES, from 1985 to 1987.